quarta-feira, 9 de novembro de 2011

Ideias do caraças!

Global Village Construction Set
Another wildly successful Kickstarter campaign: 10 days still remaining

We first came across Marcin Jakubowski’s incredible Global Village Construction Set (GVCS) back in April, following his well-received TED presentation. The concept of GVCS is one of those super-simple, too-good-to-be-true proposals that has real potential to change so many lives.

What is it all about? Imagine a modular, DIY, low-cost, open source, high-performance platform. One that makes it easy to fabricate all of the 50 different industrial machines that it takes to build a small, sustainable civilization complete with modern comforts.

The aim of the GVCS is to lower the barriers to entry into farming, building, and manufacturing. Its a life-size lego set that can create entire economies…

Like all good farmers, Marcin and the guys from Open Source Ecology have certainly been busy.

Opening their project to the hands of the public with a highly successful Kickstarter campaign, things are looking good for the first set of prototypes that have been developed.

Click through for more information about the campaign, as well as a deeper look at the Global Village Construction Set.

If you really want to minimize the amount of toxins that you put into the environment, use rechargeable batteries. Disposable and rechargeable batteries can contain heavy metals such as mercury, lead, and cadmium, and with an estimated 3 billion batteries a year being discarded in the U.S. alone, the sometimes small amounts in each battery can really add up. Using rechargeables greatly reduces the number of batteries entering landfills, but many people don't bother buying them, or the chargers that they require. That's where earthCell batteries come in. They can be used like disposables, except that users send them away for for recharging or recycling when they're dead.

earthCells are low self-discharge nickel metal hydride (LSD NiMH) batteries, which among other things are claimed to have a much longer shelf life than regular NiMH batteries, and longer run times than alkalines. When a customer's earthCells do expire, they put them in a prepaid mailer. Once that mailer is full, the customer sends it off to the company.

Video: A Steerable Remote 'Telexistence' Robot that Transmits Sight, Sound, and Touch to the Operator

By Clay Dillow

Keio University researchers are taking telepresence to the next logical level with a new “telexistence” robot called TELESAR V, a robotic platform that doesn’t just transport the user's eyes to another location, but also his or her ears and hands as well. The idea is to break through the limitations of time and space to allow a user to actually feel like he or she is present elsewhere via a remotely operated robot that returns three sensory stimuli back to the user.

Using a head-mounted 3-D visual display, an audio system that streams sound to the user, and tactile gloves that allow the user to feel the shapes and temperatures of objects--currently the robots force vector and temp sensors can accurately relay textures as fine as the unevenness on the surface of a Lego block--the user can manipulate the robot remotely and feel what the robot feels. The designers are looking for a true avatar sensation, one that makes the user really feel that he or she is inhabiting the place of the robot.

As the winter months come up, many will be forced to stay indoors… To many, this will mean playing scrabble with grandma, watching television, doing puzzles, and sitting around the house. Why not begin an awesome project to spice up those potentially cold, dreary nights with an amazing light show decoration?